As longtime readers know, I’m basically a descriptivistwhen it comes to grammar. But some things will not stand, and that includes the latest outrage on the English language perpetrated by Best Buy. Your precious blue shirts are not beta testing anything, Best Buy. Or if they are, then you’d better not be charging full price, since a beta test, by definition, comes prior to when something is ready for commercial release. It probably sounds wonderfully geeky and techy to someone in marketing, but remember – you’re supposed to be a firm that knows something about technology, and this kind of thing fills your potential customers with doubts.

I’m not sure how to use this in a story, but it’s been freaking me out:

In case you can’t tell, that is a deer head sitting on top of a tree stump, and I see it on my way to work every day. Now, given that it has been there for months now with no change, and you can see daylight through a hole in it, it is fairly clear that it is not a real deer head, and I assume it is from some kind of target or something, but that make it almost creepier. In fact, the first few times I saw it, for just a moment I thought it was some sort of hellish deer creature hiding behind a stump and peeking out at me. So small mercies, I suppose.

Anyway, I need to turn this into a story just so I can render it benign, so I’d best figure it out.

As discerning literary types (like all readers of this blog), you are no doubt familiar with the concept of a “said bookism“, words like “exclaimed”, or “retorted” that are used in direct violation of Elmore Leonard’s rules, under the misguided impression that “said” isn’t basically invisible (back when “said” was out of fashion, one could apparently mail order “said books” with lists of the things – hence the name).

Normally, of course, these are considered bad things in this modern world, but they can be a force for good, as in these wonderful examples.

From the sound of things, there are a lot of problems with the new Robocop movie, though I, of course, am fair-minded enough to reserve judgement about the remake of a near-perfect movie and the desecration of all that I held dear in my youth. But one serious problem that really concerns me is that the new version is rated PG-freaking-13. The original, of course, was not only rated R, but it was an R that did not fool around.

Now, clearly, it is a movie that should be rated R, and have all the attendant gore that goes along with it, in order to live up to the artistic vision of the thing. But the best thing about it is that when Robocop shows up on basic cable on a lazy Saturday afternoon (will the new Robocop be rerun as obsessively in 27 years, I wonder?), you get to hear some great overdubs of the dialogue. The only thing that improves the dramatic showdown between Robocop and Boddiker’s gang at the end is hearing Leon Nash shout “Where are you, you blackguard?”

So, am I the only person who, when shutting their laptop down for the evening and putting it into the mode that lets it wake up quickly the next day, says “Sleep, now” in a creepy voice like Mr. Hand in Dark City? If so, ya’ll are missing out. It’s the high point of my day, sometimes.

So if you were to look at the bottom half of the US Olympic team’s 2014 uniforms (while perhaps holding up a hand to obscure the top half), you’d no doubt think “Oh no, Ralph Lauren has, for some reason, decided to call forth the look of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, and made our fine athletes look like a bunch of ultraviolent droogs!” But if you then moved your hand to take in the top half of the uniform, you’d realize that things were much, much worse:

So, will the story of this team have a “21st chapter” of redemption and maturity, or will it end on a darker note, like the movie?